Digitally Transforming Manufacturing Only Excels When Customers Win

High-growth manufacturers are very selective about the metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) they choose. They’re very focused on how to strengthen their companies with a customer-centric view of product customization and quality.

One CEO of a Midwestern U.S. manufacturer during a follow-up interview told me that “the analytics, metrics, and KPIs we use to measure ourselves change who we are quickly as we’re moving fast to reinvent yourselves and stay relevant to customers.” He said that they’ve narrowed down the dozens of metrics on their dashboard only to those that quantify product quality delivered to customers, delivery times, and customer satisfaction.

“Our customized products’ quality is the best marketing we have and brings us into deals we’d have never found otherwise,” the CEO continued. “And our teams only evaluate new technologies and adopt them when the customer wins first – that’s the overriding purpose in every IT investment we’re making.” The CEO and his peers who are growing 10% a year or faster all agree that any decision to digitally transform any area of their operations must deliver overwhelming value to customers to even be considered.

High growth manufacturers have an acuity, and exceptional ability to listen and empathize with customers’ problems and goals that their slower-growth competitors don’t. Their ability to orchestrate digitally transformative technologies to strengthen and fine-tune their empathy and listening skills is impressive. One of the survey goals was to determine how fast-growing manufacturers adopt and integrate analytics and Business Intelligence (BI), mobility, quality, and real-time monitoring. The results reflect how adept high-growth manufacturers are at digitally transforming themselves to be even more empathetic and capable of exceeding customer expectations:

80% of manufacturers say mobile access to CPQ improves quote accuracy and 75% say having real-time integrated mobile access enables them to complete quotes faster. The high growth manufacturing cohort also said that mobile access across their distribution and manufacturing networks increases quality and compliance by over 50%. The CEO of a medical products manufacturer says that the more accurate and frequent the collaboration with customers, the more accurate orders are. Building up perfect order performance using real-time collaboration also streamlines audits, he said, leading to more on-time deliveries.

• 52% of manufacturers are investing in greater factory automation and control to improve on-time order delivery performance and increase time-to-market. CEOs leading manufacturers growing 10% or more a year are also concentrating on upgrading legacy PLM and CAD systems to more responsive, real-time digital platforms. High growth manufacturers outdistance their peers on the levels of investment they are making revamping PLM and CAD platforms by 2X or more.  The Chief Operating Officer (COO) of an automotive supplier to Ford, GM, Toyota, and other leading vehicle manufacturers is seeing a cascade effect across their operations based on digital transformations’ contributions. When quality improves, on-time delivery improvements follow, which in turn leads to customers buying more. “We’re planning to revamp our digital platforms starting with quality management and integration to PLM so engineering can see where products are succeeding and failing fast,” the COO said. “Quality is one of our strongest sales drivers, so much so that we’re going to upgrade demand planning & forecasting, and inventory planning and forecasting.”  The following graphic illustrates manufacturers’ adoption and investment plans in the areas of PLM, SCM, and ERP for 2019.